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Jennifer Granick; Jeff Moss; Phillipe Courtot

In 2015, Jennifer Granick was the keynote speaker at Black Hat, the annual conference of the global InfoSec community held in Las Vegas (UT). In her talk, she argued that 20 years from now, the internet might complete its shift from liberator to oppressor. According to her, centralization, regulation, and an increasingly divided community of users have slowly subverted the dream of a free and open internet. These developments will continue to form the future of communication and information, and transform the internet into a slick, controlled, and closed thing. While it might still be possible to prevent this from happening, Granick believes that in the next 20 years we will need to get ready to smash the Internet apart and build something new and better.

Jennifer Granick is the director of Civil Liberties at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. Outside of academia, she is mostly known as the attorney who defended some of the more notorious criminal hackers around, including Kevin Poulsen, Aaron Swartz, Jerome Heckenkamp and the hackers in the Diebold Election Systems case.

Max Schrems; John Kennedy

“It is essential to me not to spread apocalyptic sentiments. It is about to call on people, like I do in my book, that improvements can actually be achieved and that we, the citizens, are in no way helpless when it comes to our rights.”

The story of Mac Schrems is one of engaging in a hard, long struggle that reached a pivotal moment in October 2015, when the European High Court ruled that the US can no longer portray themselves as a ‘safe harbor’ for the data trails of European citizens.

On 26 June 2013, the law student turned privacy activist filed a complaint against “Facebook Ireland”, the international headquarter of Facebook Inc., with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner. Schrems argued that the transfer of customer data to the US, where these data were processed, constitutes a “transfer to a third country,” which is only legal in the European Union if the receiving country can guarantee adequate protection of these data. Because the data is forwarded from Facebook Inc. to the NSA and other US authorities for mass surveillance programs, the...

(in deutscher Sprache & english translation) Before the end of autumn 2015, the new Staatsschutzgesetz (State Protection Law) is meant to be passed by the Austrian Parliament. Criticism of the proposed law comes from all sectors of society.

William Binney

This is a special keynote the whistleblower and former NSA intelligence official Bill Binney gave in Munich in January 2014 on the occasion of the annual Handelsblatt-Tagung “Strategisches IT-Management”.

During his speech, he outlined the procedures he helped to develop to manage the enormous amount of data gathered via automated analysis of electronic communication, ways to analyze metadata to generate profiles of suspicious groups, and how to use this information to predict potential dangers.

In the second part of his presentation, Binney emphasized that NSA operations (as well as the use of their data by other agencies) are fundamentally unconstitutional, as the US constitution does not only prohibit intelligence agencies from gathering information on domestic matters, but also from using or dispersing it for other purposes, such as criminal investigations.

With reference to the technical specifics of the fiber optic network...

Johannes Ullmaier

In 2008, literary scholar Johannes Ullmaier was invited to speak at the annual meeting of Chaos Computer Club. As his topic, he chose the personal journal written by German anarchist and poet Erich Mühsam (6 April 1878 – 10 July 1934), and the way it was used against him by the authorities after Mühsam’s incarceration in 1919.

In his talk, Ullmaier interprets the historical facts as foreboding characteristics of a ‘stone age of surveillance’, which allows him to draw parallels to contemporary legislation on privacy and surveillance in Germany.

Marcel Duchamp

In the early years of his career, Marcel Duchamp set out to revolutionize the art world: he invented the ready-made and declared art to be dead. In doing so, he did not only shock the audience, he also alienated many of his fellow artists - including the French cubists and those he deemed to be ‘optical’ painters who only seek to please, like Matisse. By the 1960s, when Joan Bakewell interviewed him for the BBC, Duchamp had become a legend who inspired the young artists of the time, especially those involved in Pop Art.

In the interview, Duchamp talks about his attitude towards his own work as well as about distancing himself from groups and artistic movements alike to follow his vision, and boredom as a strategy to attract a public after shocking the audience became impossible.

Twenty-five years after the World Wide Web was created, the issue of surveillance has become the greatest shame upon its existence. With many concerned that governments and corporations monitor people’s every move, this programme meets hackers and scientists who are using technology to fight back, and some law enforcement officers who believe it’s leading to opportunities for risk-free crimes. With contributors including World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange.

James Vasile

FreedomBox is the name of an award-winning project devoted to building small, low-cost computers that protect peoples´ privacy, security and anonymity while they use the Internet. On January 21, 2015, Version 0.3 of FreedomBox has been released. Speaking at the Elevate festival Graz, Austria, free software advocate and consultant James Vasile outlines the technical and political background and present status of development.

In this presentation at the legendary location for the legacy of Austrian avantgarde art, Forum Stadtpark, Vasile looks back at the way communication used to work in the early days of the internet. Stressing the importance of trust in communication networks, he proposes the FreedomBox as a possibility to create a convenient way for users to access encryption technology and to re-establish personal trust as the foundation of online interactions. The boxes themselves work as Debian plug servers and allow to run various software, including encrypted VOIP and email. They can also be used for routing connections around national censorship firewalls, or to replace social networking sites like facebook. For a software...

Alec Empire

Alec Empire, one of the founders of music collective Atari Teenage Riot, gave the keynote speech at the annual event of Chaos Computer Club 2014. The artist, who uses an old Atari 1040 ST for his compositions, talks about a variety of topics ranging from the beauty found in machine code and sheet music to the connections between the fight for privacy and the promotion of authors’ rights.

Drawing upon his personal experiences with streaming services and censorship in the music industry, he speaks out against passive consumerism and for an alliance between hackers, musicians and other artists to shape the digital culture of the future.

Bruce Schneier

In 2013, blog author and security expert Bruce Schneier was invited by google to give a talk as part of the “Authors at Google” series. Under the title “Liars and Outliers”, Schneier compared our use of technology and our relationship to tech companies to medieval feudalism, where the weak give up their rights for the promise to be protected by the powerful. He links this concept to the average user’s inability to control their own devices, and to the power amassed by almost monopolist corporations and service providers.